


Post-temporal

by OceanPlanet



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Tattoo Parlor, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-17
Updated: 2019-07-17
Packaged: 2020-06-30 04:06:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19845226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OceanPlanet/pseuds/OceanPlanet
Summary: »Am I at the right place?« asks Nobody and Andrew can't decide if his voice suits the distilled quality of his eyes. He must have forgotten colored lenses, he thinks, and finds it disproportionately amusing. A nobody should want to keep all things worth remembering a secret.»What for?« he asks, unmoving still, a dare to get a reaction, to see if he likes it or not.»Is this a tattoo parlor?«





	Post-temporal

There is no bell; the door, when it opens, doesn't make a sound. 

Most entry doors open inward so that they can't be pushed out by wind. This one invites wind to play with it like a catastrophe, extending outward like hands, grasping walkers by their coats and luring them inside like marionettes.

The silence seems deliberate every time; as if the sound has been edited out to build tension; the calmness of the sea before the inevitable crash of a tsunami.

The man who walks in blends into the mess of shadows, created by the succulent green of an air plant obscuring the orange glow of the pendant light, like he is made of dust. Like light cuts through him and penetrates the dark colors of his clothes instead of reflecting off them.

It's the clothing, and the intentional stillness of his upper body when he slowly makes his way towards the counter, Andrews decides. The mismatched quality of his features matches the crammed feel of the space; he'd put money on his hair not being brown. The familiarity feels like ants in Andrew's head, like an itch. Everyone who comes to this place is a subspecies, too specific in their anonymity to be a part of the something wider. He feels like an observer of cult activity, sometimes. How they paint themselves in camouflage to evade the light of torchlights behind them. How they selfishly keep all the light in themselves, bury it so deep even they can't reach it. He's never heard one laugh. He understands why Betsy thinks his job is a loop, circular cheating of time. It's hard to make changes when everything you deal with is the same.

Oh, the irony.

Nobodies all look the same, don't they? This one's hair is dark brown, a little unkempt, a little arbitrary.

His excitement irks him, just a little. But he can't be blamed. Nobodies like this one keep him alive, funny thing.

He stays leaning on his elbows, eyes following the approaching shadow, waiting for him to make the first move. Nobody seems to take a long time to cross the short distance to the counter.

Language reflects the understanding and visualization of time: in English, time is two-dimensional, linear, specified by adjectives used to describe the distance traveled and roads ahead. Making a cup of coffee takes a short time and some traumas have long-term consequences. 

That's why Andrew feels the seeds of this place, this room, in his core: he identifies with the altered perception of time. This building is a Groundhog Day, when you spend enough time in it. Some need days and some just five minutes. Five short minutes.

“Am I at the right place?” asks Nobody and Andrew can't decide if his voice suits the distilled quality of his eyes. He must have forgotten colored lenses, he thinks, and finds it disproportionately amusing. A nobody should want to keep all things worth remembering a secret.

“What for?” he asks, unmoving still, a dare to get a reaction, to see if he likes it or not.

“Is this a tattoo parlor?” Nobody looks at the walls, a pointing motion towards the posters and paintings. Andrew has always found it interesting how the largest poster, the painting in the lightest and warmest colors, gold and yellow of the embracing figures, the man towering over the woman and the union of their bodies creating a whole damn planet, doesn't seem out of place, when the idea of kissing seems irrevocably impossible in this pocket of time. 

“Do you want a tattoo?”

Nobody makes a full circle until he ends up facing him again. His eyes dart up, and to the yellow covered book on the counter, and a foot away, a blue sticky note Nicky left in the morning to let him know that he's taken the other set of keys. Their eyes meet again. Andrew feels his insides churn and liquids steam and it makes him cautious all over.

“What do you do, here?” Nobody asks.

Andrew sweeps his hand around in the directions of the catalogs. There's a poster with thirty-two tattoo designs at the entrance that he put there four days ago. The old one is on the wall on his right, directly opposite of The Kiss. When it was created, the original painting, it made people frown. It was considered pornographic. It was sold for a price five times higher than that of than any painting previously sold in Vienna.

When he stays silent, Andrew asks, “What do you want?”

“Are you Hemmick?”

“He's not here today.”

Nobody exhales through his nose almost harshly and Andrew only notices because he's paying close attention; like carrying a coin under your tongue for Charon to let you cross the river.

The silence stretches, far. Shadow eyes are no longer looking at him, no longer seem to be in the room. Andrews sighs. “Do you want a tattoo or not?” 

“I had – I talked to Hemmick about a – design.” His presence somehow seems deflated – or shifted. Like a shift in focus. It's not obvious. Andrew has had experiences.

“What do you want?” he asks, again. Skipping stones.

“Why don't you tell me?” 

Oh, it's there, it's there.

“You want me to tell you what to have permanently inked on your skin?”

He shrugs. “Why not?”

“Specific, aren't you?”

The stillness melts for a second as Nobody shifts his weight. “I'll tell you when I see something I like.”

There is a word in German: Zugzwang. It means a situation where one is forced to make an important decision. It implies inordinate stress of a moment and whispers pressure. It demands you to be strategic. It makes you a chess piece. The game is a guessing game when one isn't familiar with the board.

“Do you have a name?” Andrew asks him.

Nobody looks at him for seconds; Andrew feels each one like a dart and keeps his eyes still. For once, he doesn't know what Betsy would say about this intentionality.

They pass it, the calculated deliberation, between each other like a bullet ricocheting off their shields. Nobody tells him, “Neil.”

Neil. Simple. Short. It feels like a revelation vaster than the space it takes to chew the word out from the corner of his throat.

Andrew takes his arms off the counter and walks over to the door, only half-intentionally hidden by the wallpaper. The tiles are cold beneath his bare feet. Before, he was standing on the same spot long enough to mark his footprints in warmth. A chalk outline at a crime scene. Silent signature of a wrong participant.

The door is unlocked. He opens it and motions Neil to follow him. They go down a short corridor until he enters the first room with black walls. There is a black tattoo chair and a table and a cupboard and a stack of catalogues and a ficus big enough that it's hard to tell whether it wants to eat the room or if it's a prey of the black hole walls.

Neil doesn't fidget, but there is something fidgety about him. “I'd like something – memorable,” he says. Andrew wonders if he always holds eye contacts so intense.

“A skeleton?” he says. He finds himself funny.

“No, something – fresh. Like a – like a new start.” It sounds like a question with a lost question mark.

Somehow, out of all the pieces of furniture and decorative little objects and the line of small ceramic figures including a three-headed dog, the plant is what Neil clashes with the worst.

“Do you like surprises?” Andrew asks him.

He shrugs again. “Depends on the surprise,” he replies, looking at the chair. He steps toward the catalogues but doesn't touch them.

Andrew opens a drawer and pulls out a pair of black tattoo gloves. He opens another drawer and puts a bottle of disinfectant on the table. 

“Am I actually going to get a tattoo?” Neil asks.

“Why else would you come here?”

“Is there anything else you do? I can't tell if you're trying to confuse me – because I have money.”

 _Good for you_ , he thinks. “Are you asking if I'll kiss it better after?” It's an inappropriate joke to make. People of all background come here. It's like convergent evolution.

He sighs, barely more perceptible than before. “How much is it?”

Andrew grabs a pack of cotton pads and closes the drawer. “It's free if you pay for memory erasure”.

Neil's gaze sharpens like a whiplash. 

*

In the end, Andrew sends Neil away and tells him to come back in a few days. Neil's eyes gained electricity as if supplied by a storm when Andrew told him he couldn't do it that day; the moment showed him more second-hand emotion than he expected to see, more than Neil must have expected to share. Panic is hard to erase from the corners of your mouth. 

“How much?” Neil had asked.

Andrew knew he wouldn't be using the gloves. He left them on; they collided with the blackness of his armbands and made the touch of his fingers anonymous, like a crime scene, like an astronaut jumpsuit, like a snake's skin. “Depends on what you want gone.”

“Everything,« Neil said, with the honesty of a wolf. It's a common misconception, a common secret: in fight-or-flight situations wolves always choose flight.

“That will make you a vegetable,” he told him. He would have though Neil knew more. Maybe it's a curse, like a genetic trait, that makes them all come to this place. Andrew can mock their idiocy but then he'll have nothing to live from.

“As much as you can, then.”

He didn't correct him that _he_ wouldn't be doing anything; that this is what Nicky got his degree in neuroscience for, that he's mostly here because of misplaced generosity. He did tell him: “That's not how it works, Romeo.”

When Neil was silent, Andrew supplied, “Give me something specific. A place, a person, an event. The more important they are, the more complicated and more expensive.” After a second, he added, “With higher chances of something going wrong. You make the choice.”

It's what Nicky wants to tell each person that wants to mess with their worlds, thinking they're collecting the mess on a dustpan. Nicky is good, but it's risky business. Clients can't count on insurance on this one.

Neil made his choice.

*

On his way out, Neil pushes the exterior door open and the static noise of traffic enters the parlor like an invasion of privacy, then dies out with the soundless closing of the door.

It's a game of push and pull. Andrews doesn't doubt his certainty in Neil coming back.

He peels the black gloves off finger by finger, with fine motions of a puppet master, and wonders when the door will open next by someone other than his blood. Some routines are unplanned. Some routines are inevitable, tied to a person like a genetic disease: perhaps everyone has one of their own. A temporal loop.

After all, Neil always comes back.

**Author's Note:**

> yeethaw have a grEat day my gentle friend , get some hugs


End file.
